The smell of tobacco was the first thing that hit me. It was as stale as an old attic but as promising as dank cellar soil. We stopped alongside a frayed frame secadero, or tobacco-drying house, and got out to explore. We were just outside Vinales, in the heart of Cuba’s tobacco territory. It was harvest season, but the stout, green stalks were drooping from drought. Three trabajadores del tabaco, or tobacco workers, slowly made their way through the dry rows. One was barefoot, another wore worn-down flip-flops.

“Hola, mi amigo,” one of the men said to Frank, our guide. In Cuba, Frank told us, everyone was family. With Frank’s potbelly, it was hard to imagine he had any relation to the stick-thin tobacco workers. His signature sunglasses glared under the late March sun, while sweat dripped from his head like glaze running off a ham. From the time he had picked us up at the airport, he bragged about his rich clients like “Mr. Nabisco,” who left him with big tips and invitations for his yachts. The trabajadores eyed us warily; “Qué deseas?” They wanted to know why we were there.

Traveling on the required academic visas, my family wanted to learn everything about Cuba, including tobacco agriculture. One ironic benefit of the 1962 American embargo is that all produce grown in Cuba is perforce organic. Denied Dow and DuPont, Cuban farmers had to rely on manure for fertilizer, so the food is healthful.

We peppered the workers with questions: How do you dry the tobacco? How much money do you make? How much does the government take? They demonstrated the process of hanging and drying the leaves, each as big and brown as a baseball glove. First, the workers strung the day’s crop on twine, puncturing the stems and skewering the leaves, taking care not to damage them. The strings were then hung on poles, stretched across the high warehouse ceiling. This would air-cure the tobacco, leaving it tanned and concentrated with nicotine. Roughly 70 percent of Cuban tobacco is grown in the rich Vinales valley. At the end of the fermentation period, the government takes 90 percent of the best crop. The remainder is sold to tourists and locals.

“How long have you been a tobacco worker?” Frank translated, and one worker pointed at his hands, which revealed his gnarled, furrowed history.  His fingers were caked in a tar-like substance that stunk and looked impossible to scrub off. Calluses crested his palms from picking tobacco day after day. Another trabajadore was 52 but looked 70. His hair was graying, and when he opened his mouth to speak, there were large gaps between black-stained teeth. After every shy answer, he asked, “Comprendes?” When I snapped a picture of them, they looked at the ground almost apologetically.

While we talked, all three trabajadores smoked Cohiba cigarettes, one after another. The smoke that fumed from their mouths may have been from the very tobacco they picked and sold for nearly nothing. Once exported and refined with chemicals, it was shipped back to Cuba for local sale. They consumed what they made even while it consumed them.

Tobacco has always been a mainstay of the Cuban economy. While we were there, we were often approached by jiniteros, hustlers, who tried to get us to buy cigars for smuggling back to the U.S. Before the Revolution, the expensive smell of hand-rolled Petit Upmanns filled Havana’s cabarets and casinos like the Tropicana and the Capri. Catering to the usual vices of gambling, prostitution, and drugs, such places offered a chance for well-heeled Americans to rub shoulders with mobsters and movie stars. The night life was immortalized in the many black and white photographs of Errol Flynn, Ava Gardner, and Lucky Luciano framing the lounge at the Hotel Nacional. While Ernest Hemingway made daily visits to La Floridita and La Bodeguita bars, the majority of Cubans were like the trabajadores del tabaco: poor, illiterate, and powerless.

With one stroke of the pen, Fidel Castro changed all that in 1959. He nationalized industries and closed down the vice operations. Three years earlier, Castro first organized rebels who overthrew the corrupt Batista regime, which had allowed the mob-run hotspots to flourish. With the revolution came abuses but also free, quality medical care. Castro’s literacy brigades were the greatest legacy of the era. Cuba boasts a 99.8 percent literacy rate. Cuban citizens can now study to the level of PhD, as long as they pursue a degree in an underrepresented field and attend a local school. They only make $20 per month, but that money goes far in a socialist country. I wonder if these Revolutionary benefits will remain as the country opens up to the American way of life.

Perhaps the most ironic product of the Revolution concerns its most rebellious professional, the legendary Argentine doctor Ernesto “Che” Guevara. This Marxist served as minister of industries and head of the Cuban bank. Although he sought to ally the Soviet Union with Cuba, he later criticized the Soviets for capitulating to the Americans after the Cuban Missile Crisis; for this, he was exiled from Cuba to start revolutions elsewhere. But Che believed in the ideals of labor, discipline, and self-sufficiency. Soon after he became minister, the asthmatic cigar smoker insisted that the plan for an elevator in his new office building be scrapped. After all, if he could walk up the flights, so could everybody else. Never mind that his office was on the fourteenth floor.

Now a giant hanging of Che’s beret-clad profile frames the outside of that building in Revolutionary Plaza. Once an embarrassment to the regime, Guevara is now a hip icon of ’60s attitudes. Martyrdom sells. Tiny Santa Clara now draws thousands of tourists who flock to the pyramidal mausoleum for Guevara. It was opened in 1997 with Castro’s lighting of an eternal flame, and attached to it is a museum dedicated in his honor. Moreover, in every town Che’s handsome, determined face appears on billboards along with his sayings, like, “Hasta la Victoria siempre” and “Libertetad ou Muerte?” Now an ironic icon of capitalism, Che’s words are plastered on license plates, mugs, and T-shirts for tourists. His cigar-chomping visage has become a critical means of income for Cubans trying to eke out a living.

Like second-hand smoke, what comes around goes around. Nowadays, Cubans are trying to sell anything to tourists as they readjust to the thawing U.S.-Cuba relations. Whether it’s a lone Bayamo pedestrian cooing, “Americanos – I LOVE Americanos,” or buskers peddling hand-carved birds, woven reed snakes, or needlepoint tablecloths, many Cubans are desperately trying to find a path to the prosperity that lies just 90 miles off their coast.

Their country’s isolation has left Cubans with rarely a phone (forget about cell phones!). There is usually one TV and one doctor for each village, and the buildings are often crumbling ruins. Cubans enjoy using their doorsteps and take full advantage of other simple ways to socialize – for example, long bus lines. What will happen to these intangibles when Cubans are lured by the coming flood of gringo goods?

Blissfully oblivious to the dangers of the digital age, young men sell an antiquated Cuba aimed at baby boomers of the Ricky Ricardo era. They proudly pastel-paint their 1950s cars, relics from before the embargo. But it’s true that these diesel-belching antiques are all they have to get around with. While visiting Havana, my family drove a hot pink convertible Chevy, joining the nightly caravan of Ford Edsels, Chrysler Plymouths, and Hudson Hornets that cruise Havana. These big fins deposit their elderly tourists at Vedado and Old Havana restaurants like El Patio, where one can sometimes hear Frank Sinatra songs being performed in Cathedral Square.

Each day, American tourists totter along, repeating Hemingway’s pub crawl from Hotel Ambos Mundos to La Floridita. His hotel room is a shrine you can visit, complete with his typewriter, straw hat, and a model of “Pilar,” his beloved boat. This kind of tourism is all the country can offer; it is the decade it has been stuck in. How can a country go forward when its citizens always have to look backwards to make a living?

Probably only those like Frank, and not the trabajadores del tabaco, will benefit. Even so, our Frank was no Frank Sinatra. He boasted that his ancestors were key players in the Revolution, printing leaflets in Santiago and running guns for Castro’s uprising at Comandancia de la Plata, Castro’s guerrilla compound in the Sierra Maestra. Yet Frank could just as easily disavow this past, telling turistas in the next breath how his Chinese grandpa ran a store that the revolutionaries closed down, reducing him to begging, no different from the tobacco workers.

It was almost sundown, and the men were shifting their feet, probably expecting a tip for their time. Even though I wanted to help them, I didn’t want to appear patronizing. I gave them a 20 CUC note (about $20). They never told us their names, and they were surprised that we wanted to shake hands. But I like to think that we took some of the sludge off their hands, and, for a moment, took some Cubano culture into our own. Then they asked Frank, “Hey, why don’t you bring more tourists to us?”